"David Weinshenker" <daze39@earthlink.net> wrote in message

A disturbing announcement was made at the July 1992 international AIDS conference held in
Amsterdam: Several people with symptoms of AIDS, but who had no evidence of infection with
either HIV-1 or HIV-
2 (the viruses generally believed, at the time, to cause AIDS), had been identified by the U.S.
Centers for Disease Control.

A few weeks later, in early September, Newsweek made an even more shocking announcement: that
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome researcher Dr. Paul Cheney had in his practice 20 CFS patients who had
the same immune system deficiencies as the non-HIV AIDS cases revealed at the Amsterdam
conference.

What wasn't known to most observers was that one of the researchers who had first said publicly
that he was aware of such cases, Dr. Sidhur Gupta of the University of California, Irvine, is
himself a Chronic Fatigue Syndrome researcher.

The fact that some CFS patients were developing exactly the same immune system problems as AIDS
patients, however, raised the questions not only of what was causing that immune system
destruction but also of the relationship that exists between the two syndromes.

The hallmark of the HIV-negative AIDS cases, as established by the Centers for Disease Control,
is a depletion of a type of immune system cell called T4 (or CD4) cells. The T4 cells of AIDS
patients can fall to very low levels and, although recent studies have suggested that there is
no real correlation with health status, a decreasing T4 cell count is generally viewed as a
sign of worsening disease.

The CDC decided to call the HIV-negative, AIDS-like disease "ICL" (an abbreviation for
"idiopathic CD4-positive T-lymphocytopenia," which simply means an unexplained depletion of T4
cells).

Most healthy people have a T4 cell count of approximately 1,000; a T4 cell count below 800 is
considered abnormal. In order to be diagnosed with ICL, a person must have a T4 cell count of
less than 300.

One of the most puzzling things about the ICL cases to AIDS researchers -- other than the fact
that they didn't have HIV -- is that most of the patients do not fit into recognized AIDS "risk
behavior" categories; that is, they were not gay men, IV drug users, or the sexual partners of
people in those risk groups. These cases may, in fact, be dramatic evidence that federal
officials have not told the public the whole truth about the nature and the full scope of the
AIDS epidemic.

The mystery of what role HIV actually plays in causing the immune system deterioration and
symptoms seen in AIDS deepened in early October 1992. The British medical journal The Lancet
reported that five people had received blood from a man later found to be infected with HIV;
however, ten years later, the five transfusion recipients as well as the original, HIV-positive
blood donor remained free of AIDS symptoms and were apparently healthy. The Australian
researchers who reported those cases concluded that these six people were infected with a
non-disease-causing strain, or type, of HIV.

The link between the immune system dysfunction seen in AIDS and in CFS was made explicit in
early 1993 when government scientists admitted that CFS patients, like AIDS patients, suffer a
decline in T4 cells. The government's leading CFS researcher, Dr. Stephen Straus at the
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, published a research paper in The
Journal of Clinical Immunology in which a decrease in the number of T4 cells in CFS patients
was documented.

Dr. Straus proposed a novel mechanism to explain the loss of T4 cells in CFS patients: The T4
cells of CFS patients were not depleted, as they were in AIDS patients, according to Dr.
Straus; they were just hiding in organ tissues. Unfortunately, Dr. Straus was unable to produce
any evidence to support this theory (and still has not done so). Dr. Straus did not suggest
that any of his CFS patients had T4 cell counts so low that they could be identified as ICL
patients.

Meanwhile, Dr. Cheney, in addition to announcing that some of his CFS patients had low enough
T4 cell counts to be considered non-
HIV AIDS cases, reported that as many as 40 percent of his CFS patients also had a close
associate with an illness similar to CFS.

This information -- along with the mystery of why AIDS could develop without HIV infection and
why HIV infection does not always lead to AIDS -- raised the possibility that a virus or
bacteria that spreads more easily than HIV could be attacking people's immune systems.